Connecting the Dots

In M.G.Vassanji’s The Magic of Saida, a man with an African mother and an Indian father returns home to Tanzania after long years in Canada. Elif Shafak’s Honor features a mixed Turkish-Kurdish couple in 1970s London, while Nancy Kricorian’s All the Light There Was features an Armenian family in World War II Paris. It’s easy enough to group books by standard categories like thriller, historical fiction, and memoir, which I’ve been doing lately to help facilitate entry into all the intriguing titles I report on, but the greater challenge—and pleasure—it to find patterns like the one I just described in the books I survey each month. The fiction books this week all cross borders, as the title suggests, showing cultural interaction in a larger context. (I eventually moved Vassanji’s novel and Ruth.Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being to “Picks,” but they informed my writing of that section.) I hope such dot connecting is informative and, more to the point, fun.